ETERNAL VIGILANCE

New York Times Supports McCarthyite Witch Hunt

By Juan Cole
April 8, 2005, Informed Comment

I am cancelling my subscription to the New York Times, and I urge others to do the same.

The New York Times editorial board went over to the Dark Side on Thursday, with an editorial that blasted the end results of a panel at Columbia University that investigated whether students had been intimidated by professors at Columbia University. The panel found that there was no evidence of any such thing, that no students had been punished for their views by lowered grades, that there was no evidence of racial bigotry.

The NYT nevertheless praised the neo-McCarthyite "film" (actually it is large numbers of films that are constantly re-edited and have never been publicly shown) produced by the shadowy anti-Palestinian "David Project." But the "film" is not an objective document. I could interview on film lots of people who ascribed all sorts of bad behavior to the editors of the New York Times and call it a "damning documentary." Students, including Israelis, who have actually taken classes in Middle East studies at Columbia dispute the films' allegations.

The real question here is whether it is all right to dispute the Zionist version of history. The David Project, AIPAC, the American Jewish Congress, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Middle East Forum, Campus Watch, MEMRI, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Zionist Organization of America, etc., etc., maintain that it is not all right. Some of them have even been known to maintain that disputing Zionist historiography is a form of hate speech.

Historians are unkind to nationalism of any sort. Nineteenth century romantic nationalism of the Zionist sort posits eternal "peoples" through history, who have a blood relationship (i.e. are a "race") and who have a mystical relationship with some particular territory. The Germans, who were very good at this game, called it "blood and soil." Nationalism casts about for some ancient exemplar of the "nation" to glorify as a predecessor to the modern nation. (Since nations actually did not exist in the modern sense before the late 1700s, the relationship is fictive. To explain what happened between ancient glory and modern nationalism, nationalists often say that the "nation" "fell asleep" or "went into centuries of decline. My colleague Ron Suny calls this the "sleeping beauty" theory of nationalism.)

But there are no eternal nations through history. People get all mixed up genetically over time, except for tiny parts of the genome like the mitochondria or the Y chromosome, on which too much emphasis is now put. Since there are no eternal nations based in "blood," they cannot have a mystical connection to the "land." People get moved around. The Turks now in Anatolia once lived in Mongolia (and most Turks anyway are just Greeks who converted to Islam and began speaking Turkish).

The David Project wants Middle East historians to reproduce faithfully in the classroom the Zionist master narrative as the "true" version of history. We aren't going to do that, and nobody can make us do it, and if anyone did make us do it, it would be destructive of academic, analytical understandings of history. Next the Serbs will be demanding that we explain why the Bosnians had to be suppressed, and the Russians will object to any attempt to understand the roots of Chechen terrorism, and the Chinese will object to our teaching about Taiwan. The American Nazi Party will maintain that the Third Reich is presented unsympathetically in university history classes, etc. etc. Ethnic nationalisms if allowed to dictate the teaching of history would destroy the entire discipline.

The NYT editorial concludes:

"But in the end, the report is deeply unsatisfactory because the panel's mandate was so limited. Most student complaints were not really about intimidation, but about allegations of stridently pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli bias on the part of several professors. The panel had no mandate to examine the quality and fairness of teaching. That leaves the university to follow up on complaints about politicized courses and a lack of scholarly rigor as part of its effort to upgrade the department. One can only hope that Columbia will proceed with more determination and care than it has heretofore."

What the editors mean by "anti-Israeli" is not spelled out. But generally the term means any criticism of Israel. (You can criticize Argentina all day every day till the cows come home and nobody cares in the US, but make a mild objection to Ariel Sharon putting another 3500 settlers onto Palestinian territory in contravention of all international law and of the road map to which the Bush administration says it is committed, and boom!, you are branded a racist bigot. And if you dare point out that Sharon's brutality and expansionism end up harming America and Americans by unnecessarily making enemies for us (because we are Sharon's sycophants), then you are really in trouble.

Personally, I think that the master narrative of Zionist historiography is dominant in the American academy. Mostly this sort of thing is taught by International Relations specialists in political science departments, and a lot of them are Zionists, whether Christian or Jewish. Usually the narrative blames the Palestinians for their having been kicked off their own land, and then blames them again for not going quietly. It is not a balanced point of view, and if we take the NYT seriously (which we could stop doing after they let Judith Miller channel Ahmad Chalabi on the front page every day before the war), then the IR professors should be made to teach a module on the Palestinian point of view, as well. That is seldom done.

Academic teaching is not about balance or "fairness" or presenting "both sides" of an issue. It is about teaching people to reason analytically and synthetically about problems. The NYT approach would ruin our ability to do this and would impose a particular version of history on us all by fiat. It even implies that some committee should sanction anyone critical of Israel.

Universities are about skewering sacred cows. Anyone who doesn't want their views challenged or their feelings hurt should stay away from them. If you can't handle an intellectual challenge, you shouldn't be on campus. And you certainly shouldn't be editing a major newspaper.

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Editor's comment: The editorial board went over to the Dark Side? What does Juan Cole expect from the NY Times editorial board? That outfit is long known as a Zionist mouthpiece and the voice of Zionism in the US. They have been controlled by the Dark Side for many decades now, as is the rest of the mainstream media.

The “David Project” is obviously a Zionist propaganda front group. It is good he takes on the oppressors of free speech and the Zionist controllers.

Is it any wonder that historians are unkind to nationalism? They have all been trained by the cultural communists to look the other way when anyone other than Jews claim an ethnic heritage as a matter of right.

There are many examples of peoples having a blood relationship with the soil, but citing the German example as a "game" is disingenuous and calls into question just what sort of historian Cole really is. Certainly, if we look at European history, the Spanish, French, Germans, English and others have a deep and abiding relationship with the land. Our agrarian roots, long ignored by the modernists, need to be revitalized as a means to keep our ethnic heritage and identity.

We would like to know what history they have been reading that says the modern nation-state did not exist prior to the late 1700s. Perhaps Cole means that feudalism ruled the day. But we have evidence that feudalism was over in England with the War of the Roses (1455-87) which brought about the destruction of the English nobility. They never recovered as a class after that time. The Tudors were the final victors late in that civil war after the Lancasters and Yorks had been diminished.

And with the advent of Martin Luther's Reformation and An Open Letter to The Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate (1520) and the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope (1537), feudalism was on the way out in continental Europe.

Note in the above that Luther refers to the German Nation. And clearly, with the rejection of the Pope as being supreme, the peoples of Europe were taking control of their own destinies by breaking with Rome.

Serfdom itself was rare in most of Europe after the Renaissance (14th century) and the end of the Dark Ages, but persisted in Russia until its abolition in 1861. On the whole, the remnants of feudalism and serfdom were done away with in Europe by Voltaire's Enlightenment. An important distinction to be made is the difference between Frederick the Great, who said, "I am the first servant of my state,” and Louis XIV, who said, “I am the State.”

What is found to be most disturbing is Cole's false interpretation of ethnic nationalism. Indeed, nationalism is the basis for maintaining a people's cultural identity, whether that is in the form of religious activities, language or other social and legal foundations. These again are based on blood relations to their native lands and are exemplified by the Volga Germans who settled in Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great, and of the Banat Germans who settled the Danube River valley in Serbia and environs at the invitation of Maria Theresa of Austria. Both areas were lands conquered back from the Ottoman Empire. Both groups eventually suffered the depredations of the communists in the 1940s.

We also see ethnic minorities in Europe and elsewhere still trying to gain a foothold of survival. Czechoslovakia is a good example, as is Yugoslavia, of these arbitrary nation-states created by the European powers. If one was Czech, though not an ethnic German, you were of Protestant heritage (Moravia, Silesia, Bohemia). Though Bohemia was under the control of Austria, as was Silesia until Frederick the Great invaded and took Silesia at the start of the Austrian War of Succession in 1740.

The Slovaks were ethnic Slavs of Roman Catholic heritage. A study of the Austro-Hungarian Empire will reveal more, as the Catholic influence extended into Galicia, the western part of Ukraine under control of the Habsburgs. There were also ethnic Germans settled in much of Galicia. Eastern Ukraine was under the influence and control of Moscow and the Russian Orthodox Church.

So, therefore, if as Juan Cole suggests, the discipline of teaching history would be destroyed by allowing ethnic nationalism a voice, is beyond the pale of logic. It is specious to represent that a clear understanding of our history, European history specifically, would lead to anything other than rooting out the true cause of divisiveness among ethnic groups.

Apparently, Cole figures he may pick and choose which parts of Zionism he would like to oppose. It is only in the interests of the international Jew to keep the truth about ethnic groups hidden. In modern day Turkey there is still a sizable Hellenic minority, and they historically belong to Greek Orthodox Christianity. There is an identity crisis and their ancient roots have been brought out recently.

Unfortunately, without teaching balance and fairness, or what might be termed truth, concerning the ethnic and national origins of European peoples, we ignore the fact that unless we know where we have been, we can never know where we are going. And unless we know these things, there can never be a resolution of the strife that continues to this day. This is the basis of truth in history.

Without this truth, the hatred of Talmudic Zionist Jews will overcome the ethnic and national origins of many peoples who deserve to know these things. This is the basis of continuing ethnic strife in many parts of the world today, especially in the Middle East among the Arabs and Israelis. It is the basis of the break up of the phony states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. And even tiny Belgium with its Flemish and Walloon ethnicities is not exempt from this.

Juan Cole talks about “intellectual challenge.” It might be a good thing for him to challenge his own institutional bias and skewer his own sacred cows. It has become fashionable for former leftists to attack political Zionism and support the Palestinians. What they fail to see is that even the Palestinians have an ethnic heritage and a history, and so does the Zionist colonization of their land.